The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (31 page)

Confused and slightly embarrassed, Joanna admitted, “Computer systems designer.”

“And upon that,” Antryg took up, with a smile at Magus' baffled look as he took the wineglass from Magus' hand and gave it to Joanna, “hangs a tale indeed.”

“Joanna.”

Startled, she sat up in bed, her blond hair hanging in her eyes; the faint scratching noise she had attributed to rats came again from the door. She realized it was the more quiet alternative to knocking and scrambled through the gauzy white curtains which acted as an effective mosquito netting in a world whose wire-drawing technique did not yet extend to window screens. “Who is it?” Somewhere in the humid darkness beyond the tall windows, a clock chimed three; down in the street, a distant, dreary peddler's voice was singing a song about matches.

“Caris.”

The moon had set long ago. In Angelshand there was no such thing as the reflected glow of streetlights from outside-there wasn't a streetlight in the whole city-and the only light in the room came from a tiny seed of fire in an amber glass night lamp on the washstand. By its minute glow, she located the nightrobe the Prince had included in her luggage, an amazing confection of gauze and lace, and went to unbrace the chair from the door.

He was standing in the hall outside. The tall, narrow house was silent, save for the soft, sonorous breathing of her host, which could be heard through the open door of his bedchamber next to hers. Caris was dressed, as usual, in the plain livery of a servant, but all of the costume he wore at the moment were the breeches, shirt, and stockings, all creased as if he had slept in them. His blond hair was ruffled from a pillow-she remembered how he had sat silently watching her and the two wages, as Antryg and Magus had exchanged stories and reminiscences until the small hours, and had then followed Antryg silently up to the attics to sleep.

“May I come in?”

She stepped aside. She knew that a month ago she would never have done so, even if he had rescued her from an evil wizard's clutches-but a month ago, she hadn't killed two men.

And oddly enough, in the last several days, a little to her own surprise, she had come to like the sasennan. She had formerly been slightly afraid of that silent, beautiful young man, distrustful of the scorn she was sure he felt for her plainness and inexperience. But like Antryg, Caris took people exactly as he found them; if he had not expected her to be able to climb walls and evade armed troops, neither had he assumed she would fail. It was she, she realized, who had held prejudiced expectations of him; but unlike Antryg, he wasn't the sort of man you could apologize to for it.

“Joanna,” he said softly, “I need your help.”

She said nothing. She knew-or hoped, anyway-that she wouldn't act like one of those whining and putty-willed movie heroines who took pots shots at the hero because of a desperate attachment they had formed for the villain, but she had hoped also that she wouldn't be asked to choose.

That, too, she thought, had been a stupid hope. Whether she wanted to or not, she was in a game for keeps; the riddles locked up behind Antryg's mad gray eyes and lunatic smile affected the fates of both worlds, hers, perhaps, more than Caris'. After a long moment, she found herself asking, “What do you want me to do?”

From his pocket, Caris brought out a creased scrap of paper. In the floating ochre light she saw it was a map. Though one house was marked, there was no number-that was another modern innovation that Angelshand lacked.

“I suspect Antryg is going out soon as it's light,” the warrior said softly. “He came to Angelshand for purposes of his own. I can't afford to lose him now. But I must get in contact with Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag. He's the only friend the Council has at Court, the only one to whom the Regent might listen. He's a friend of my grandfather's-a scientist, but one who believes there is something more to magic than hocus-pocus and dog wizardry.”

He held out the paper to her. She took it, stiff and heavy-feeling in her cold fingers.

“Tell him what happened and where we are. Tell him that I need an introduction to the Court and that I have Antryg Windrose, if not my prisoner, at least in my sight. Tell him what happened to my grandfather.”

She set the paper on the washstand. “I'll tell him your grandfather disappeared,” she said slowly, “but to be literally truthful, I don't know what happened to your grandfather-and neither do you.”

Caris' mouth tightened a little, and the brown eyes in their wells of shadow seemed to harden to agate.

Slowly, a little gropingly, Joanna went on, “I don't know anything, really-only what I've been told, either by you or by Antryg. All I want to do is get the hell out of this mess and go home . . . .” She broke off again, something strange stirring in her heart, because it wasn't, entirely, all she wanted . . . .

“And I tell you this,” Caris said quietly. “That Antryg stalked you, and Antryg went to that house where he left his mark upon the wall to find you, and Antryg brought you here, for purposes of his own; and from that I collect that, unless we find my grandfather, unless we free the Council from persecution, you will never return to your home. Do you understand that?”

After a long moment Joanna sighed, and said softly, “Yes.”

Caris stood for a time, looking down at his hands where they rested over the hilt of his scabbarded sword, thrust through the sash tied incongruously over his servant livery. Then, not so harshly, as if he, too, were fumbling for the right words, he said, “I am not asking you to do him harm. Whether harm comes to him . . . it could from any number of sources. But I must know what he plans in Angelshand and I must not let him out of my sight. You are the only one I can count on. May I do so?”

Knowing he was right, wretchedly glad that it was no worse, Joanna nodded miserably. With a deep bow, Caris faded into the darkness of the hall. She stood still for a few moments with her hands resting on the satiny wood of the doorframe, wishing she knew, if not what to do, at least what to feel. Though the attic stairs ran close to her room, she did not hear his soundless tread as he ascended.

As Caris had guessed they might be, both he and Antryg were gone from the house by the time Joanna woke. She had breakfast with Magister Magus, during which a solemn manservant in a truly startling livery of rose-hued plush announced that the Marquise of Inglestoke had arrived and awaited audience, and left him probing philosophically for the pursuit of his trade.

Although Antryg's spell of languages allowed her to understand and be understood, Joanna had no idea of the written word. Caris, aware of that, had drawn his map to Narwahl Skipfrag's house on Cheveley Street in careful detail, and she had no difficulty finding the place. It was about two miles from the square where Magister Magus had his lodgings, through crowded streets of shop fronts, offices, and squares of tenement lodgings where coster-mongers yelled their wares from handcarts and beggars whined to the passers-by; but having walked almost eighty miles in the last week, Joanna found the distance no concern.

It was only when she was within half a block of the place that she saw that two sasenna guarded its door.

She halted on the pavement, looking up the short flight of granite steps to the narrow frontage of the house. She shifted her purse on her shoulder, slipped the map from the pocket of her voluminous skirt and checked it, and counted doors from the corner-but in her heart, she knew the guarded door was Narwahl Skipfrag's. He was a friend of the wizards; the black livery of the sasenna was of the soft samurailike cut of the Church sasenna, and she could see the sun emblem of the Sole God like gory flowers upon their shoulders.

For their benefit, she looked up and down the street again, sighed, and shook her head, then walked away down the flagway, still gravely studying her map.

At the corner, she turned and shoved the map into her purse. This was a larger street, bustling with foot and carriage traffic and redolent of horse droppings, garbage, and flies. Across the lane a furniture mender had moved most of his shop out onto the flagway to take advantage of the forenoon sun; a noodle shop run by a couple of braided-haired Old Believers released clouds of steam into the air and Joanna shuddered, thinking what the heat must be like inside. She walked along the pavement until she found the narrow mouth of the alley and, with a slight feeling of trepidation, picked up her skirts and turned into that blue and stinking canyon.

As she had suspected from the layout of Magister Magus' house, the houses of this row all had little yards behind them-by the smell of it, with the privy up against the back fence. Garbage choked the unpaved lane; nameless liquids reduced the dirt underfoot to nauseous slime. Against the faded boards of the fences, the red wax of the Church's seal stood out brilliantly and saved her even the trouble of counting back gates.

She glanced up and down the alley and put her eye to a knothole in the rickety gate. There was no one in the narrow little yard, but, as on the gate, she could see the Church's seal had been affixed to the back door at the top of its little flight of steps. She tested the gate, pulled her Swiss Army knife from her purse, and slipped it under the seal, breaking it from the wood; then she pushed the gate softly open and went in.

The house stood silent. Empty, she thought-but in that case, why post guards?

The only friend the wizards had at Court, she thought. The Regent had turned back, returning to Angelshand, perhaps-going to visit Cerdic, certainly . . . Caris had said he was growing increasingly paranoid . . . .

She was aware of her heart beating achingly as she mounted the steps and leaned over to look through the window beside the door.

She saw a library, shadowy and barely visible giving an impression of comfortable, old-fashioned chairs and a heavy chimney breast with carving over it. No fire-but then in summer there wouldn't be.

Joanna took a deep breath, formulated her cover story about a dying sister who must see Dr. Skipfrag or perish, and thrust her knife under the wax of the seal. It cracked clear; she found her wallet, extracted a credit card, and used the thin, hard plastic to raise the latch.

The house was empty. She knew it, standing in the brown dimness of the hall. Carefully, she untied and removed her low-heeled shoes, cursed her yards of petticoat as she gathered them in hand to keep from knocking over furniture, and moved as soundlessly as she could along the wall toward the stairs.

In the bedroom on the second floor, she found a ruffled bed, the covers flung back but the creased sheets long cold. A drawer was open in the top of the highboy; peering into it, Joanna could see that something had been taken hastily from it scattering cravats and gloves. On the marble top of the highboy a few grains of black powder were scattered, and the experience of the last week had taught Joanna the look and smell of oldfashioned black gunpowder.

Silently, she ascended the next flight of steps.

From uncurtained windows, a whitish light suffused the attic; the trapped heat of days made the room stuffy. The smell of old blood nearly turned her sick. It was splattered everywhere, turned dark brown now against the white paint of the walls and the pale plaster of the ceiling; little droplets of it had dripped back onto the pooled and rivuleted floor. For some reason, the sight of it brought back to her the memory of how hot the sasennan's blood had been, splattering against her face; she shut her teeth tightly against a clench of nausea.

The calm part of her that could analyze program glitches at three in the morning and that told her it was stupid to fall in love with a middleaged wizard in another universe asked, What the hell could have caused this?

Curious, she took a step forward. She drew back her stockinged foot immediately as it touched something sharp. She saw it was a small shard of broken glass. When she bent to pick it up, she saw there were others, sparkling in the wan light on the bloodstained floor and, she noticed, embedded here and there in the walls, as well. She held the shard up to the light. It was edged with old blood.

With a nervous shake of her hand she threw it from her. She didn't know why, but there was something in the touch of it that filled her with loathing and with fear. There wasn't a great deal of glass-not more than one smashed beaker's worth-but it was widely scattered. Picking her way carefully, she crossed the room to the laboratory tables beneath the dormer windows on the other side.

It had been a long time since she'd taken her Fundamentals of Electricity course in college, but she recognized most of what she saw there primitive cell-batteries with their lined-up dishes of water, a vacuum pump, and crudely insulated copper wire. An iron-and-copper sparking generator sat in the midst of a tangle of leads, and a glass Volta pistol gleamed faintly in the sunlight on a corner of the table. Other objects whose use she did not know lay among the familiar, archaic equipment convoluted glass tubing and little dishes of colored salts. At the back of the litter sat a seamless glass ball, silvered over with what looked like mercury, gleaming evilly in the diffuse light. Joanna shrank from touching it, repelled without knowing why. Above the table, in the middle of the whitewashed wall, was the fresh scar of a bullet hole; beside her hand, the wooden table's edge was also freshly scarred, as if someone had smashed a glass vessel against it in a rage.

Her first thought was, Antryg would know what happened.

Her second, as she heard the soft jostle of an unwary step of booted feet somewhere in the house below her was, I have no line of retreat

They'll have seen the broken-off seals,
she thought, even as she scanned the low ceiling for a trap door to the roof. There was none. The windows might have been made to open once upon a time, but they had long since been barred to prevent the ingress of thieves. She thought, There's a wardrobe in the bedroom-they might pass me by and I could get out behind them . . . She had to fight with everything in her to walk, silently and carefully, instead of running to the stairs.

It cost her her escape. The two sasenna and the man in the gray garb of a Witchfinder had just reached the second floor as she came silently around the corner of the narrow stair.